Tuesday of this previous week I started an illustration project for Brutal Bitches Productions, a metal music concert organizing company based out of the Bronx. Was told to do something with a sexy metal chick, surrounded by carnage. But had to do it in a way that there would be enough room for the band logos and event info to not completely block the imagery.
Send one sketch, that was rejected, so then sent this one as a thumbnail, and got an okay to work with it.

“Just make it sexy, add some decapitations, and monsters, okay?”

I think I should have no problem with that, *wicked smile*. Have I mentioned that I love what I do?

Next step was some rough sketching and then adding ballpoint linework over the pencil so I could erase and have a clean working surface, so that line art became this….

The original idea was to stick to a mostly black and white image to make it very bold, and include some splashes of color, so I started working in my shading using varying grays. Pretty much just acrylic washes of payne’s gray to build up what I wanted it to look like in a basic sense.

Then,… well it was decided that full color would be so much cooler as the band logos look pretty crazy in color and the illustration had to work with them and not be completely obscured by them. So started laying in color washes over the gray shading, and that ended up coming out along these lines.

A few more washes to close out some of the white spots and darken some spots I wanted to set back, and then the next real part was the outlines in micron on the things that were more foreground prevalent. Basically the outlines on the figure (Metal Goddess) and her hair were in black micron, which is basically like a really fine tipped marker for line art. The background buildings and figures got touched up with more ballpoint so as not to compete too much with the foreground.

The last thing I did before sending it off to BBP was to adjust the levels digitally so the dark parts were even darker and the color a little sharper. For illustration projects I generally go this route, because that way I’m not physically working everything so dark that it can’t be changed if necessary.

After sending the file on Thursday, yes Tuesday night til Thursday morning, was a quick turnaround for this piece (read: very little sleep) had to wait til today to see the fully edited version. With the colors and the logos it looks pretty sick indeed. All in all cool project with a fun conclusion. Hopefully the event is as metal as the poster. \m|_ Like BrutalBitchesOnFacebook _|m/